Virago
by BlueIris08
Summary: She was all light and steel, and Castiel found he wanted to feel that steel turn molten under his touch.


_Additional author's notes_: A very long time ago I saw a challenge for a Castiel/Ellen pairing. It sounded pretty improbable, to be frank, but then I thought, "Why let that stand in the way of giving Ellen a night of hot sex with a cute guy before 'Abandon All Hope' ends?"

* * *

They dispersed not long after the picture was taken, all _'I'm hitting the sack, boys,'_ and _''Night, Mom,'_ and _'Don't let Cas talk your ear off, Ellen.'_ Castiel rose from the table where he and Ellen had 'done another round of shots' with no particular destination in mind, and discovered that his vessel's sense of balance was impaired.

"Whoa." Ellen was beside him, also somewhat unsteady. "We could both use some fresh air, huh?"

Castiel had no use for air of any sort, but Ellen had been kind to him and he rather liked the thought of leaving Bobby's grimy kitchen, so he shrugged and obliged her.

"Is this better?"

"Oh, my God," she said, covering her mouth. Chagrined to realize that he had materialized them somewhat closer to the edge of a precipice than he'd intended, Castiel nudged her back a step.

"Oh, my God," she said again. "Where are we?"

"Capreae. I once had…what you might call business here, many years ago." Castiel explained. He had visited often since. "The air is very fresh."

"Business?" she repeated, not turning her eyes from a view lovely enough to soothe the most restless of souls.

"With Caesar." The bitter old man who had built the great villa crumbling behind them had a name of his own, but Castiel had long since forgotten it. "He had tired of Rome. I thought ill of him for abandoning his post, but one cannot fault his taste in surroundings."

She shook her head in wonderment. "This is the most beautiful place I've ever been."

"In the summer…" Castiel gazed down the cliff, grieved by the knowledge that he would never again see wild yellow flowers standing bright against the turquoise waters below. He had known when he first set foot on the island that its beauty would remain with him to the end of his days; he had not imagined how very soon that end would be. "In the summer, it's one of the most beautiful places in Creation."

A cold wind blew over the hilltop, making her shiver. Remembering that his coat was both warm and detachable from his present form, Castiel offered it to her. She accepted, and together they watched the rising sun lay golden paths across the crystalline sea.

When it was full daylight she turned in a circle, taking a last look around them, and then lifted her chin. "I guess it's tomorrow," she said, though there were still some hours of dark left back in South Dakota. "Thank you, Cas," she added, laying her hand on his forearm.

He quirked his head at the contact, strange to him but so well-known to his body. It stirred unfamiliar sensations within him, and color rose in her cheeks as he met her eyes again.

He knew that her husband's death was a wound long since healed and that she enjoyed taking a man to her bed in the same way that she enjoyed an occasional cigar on a warm summer evening. He knew that she found his form attractive but had not imagined him as a partner until this moment. He knew that she sought above all to avoid distressing her daughter with the anxiety she had so far kept hidden, and that she did not want to spend her last night alone.

Perhaps it was the prodigious amount of alcohol still in Castiel's bloodstream that led his hand to her cheek. "May I?" he asked, but she was already dropping his coat to the ground and reaching for him.

"I've not done this before," he confessed.

She offered him a warm, melancholy smile and unknotted his tie. "Well, no one should die like that."

She handled his body with easy confidence, readily giving him pleasure and unashamed of showing her own needs in return. She was all light and steel, and Castiel found he wanted to feel that steel turn molten under his touch. When she whispered to him sweet words that no angel should hear in an earthy tone that no angel should recognize, he murmured back that the light in her eyes was more beautiful than all the chariots of Lydia and that fire raced through his flesh as they came together. He learned the currents running beneath her skin until she cried out in a kind of delirium, and when her body began to pulse around him Castiel, for the first time in his eons of existence, lost control. He rolled them over to pin her twisting form beneath his as he drove into her, his hand between them making her body keep producing those amazing sensations as climax rushed through him like wind shaking a mountain oak.

Her moans had turned to rough gasps by the time he came back to himself. "Forgive me," he said, drawing away.

She passed a hand over her eyes, catching her breath. "Sugar, Bobby isn't here to translate."

Castiel struggled to make sense of the unsettling interjection of condiments and Robert Singer into the conversation. 'Sugar' he belatedly recognized as a term of endearment; as for the other…

"My apologies. I spoke Greek for many years," he explained in the correct language. "I said that the electrical impulses in your nervous system are easily manipulated. I didn't mean to overtax you."

She laughed throatily, a delightful sound. "It takes more than that to wear out a woman my age," she reassured him. "Are you sure you haven't done this before?"

"Yes. I would not have forgotten."

With another laugh she rolled onto her side and leaned back against him. Castiel wrapped an unseen wing around them for warmth and laid a hand on the smooth skin of her belly for companionship. He found that his hand did not want to stay in that particular location, but he firmly suppressed the urge for it to wander.

"That mountain is familiar," she said after a few moments, nodding at the silhouette of the double peaks in the distance.

A shadow passed over Castiel's spirit as he remembered a day when ash had blotted out the sun and stones fell from the sky. "Vesuvius," he told her, feeling her shiver again as she recognized the name.

She turned back to face him. Careworn lines that had faded from her face during their lovemaking had returned, now that death hung around them again. "How many years did you speak Greek, Cas?" she asked.

"Thirty-three," he said, cocking his head at her curiously. "We all moved amongst you while the Redeemer walked the earth."

She averted her gaze, as if she could let him see her body at its most vulnerable but not her heart. "It's true, then?"

"Yes," he said, understanding her question now. Details of theology were immaterial; he could still give her the truth she wanted to hear. "There is salvation for your kind, Ellen, I promise."

"Thank God," she murmured, lowering her head to his chest. Some old memory left in his muscles led him to stroke her hair and draw her closer; a much more recent memory caused other parts of his body to stir as she pressed against him. He suspected that an etiquette dilemma was about to present itself.

She cleared her throat. "The others will probably be wondering about us."

"I doubt it. They were sound asleep when we left." He had sensed Jo and Bobby's slumbering sprits; the Winchesters' souls were hidden from his sight, but not their snores from his ears. "No one will look for us until the morning."

There was a pause long enough for Castiel to ascertain that the human body most certainly did have a mind of its own. He was wondering what was the proper way to disentangle their nude bodies when she looked up at him, sweeping her hair back with a gleam in her eyes. "I guess we'll have to find something to do with ourselves, then."

Devoutly hoping had had, for once, read human body language correctly, he let his fingers drift over her throat. "I would _very_ much," he said, "like to discover what it takes to wear out a woman your age."

She arched her neck, humming approval as he sent delicate sparks of pleasure through her nerves with his trailing fingers. "Good choice."

He transported them away from the cold ruins of a dead empire to an empty bedroom beneath the eaves of Bobby's roof, taking measures to see that they were not disturbed, and set about to make the most of their few remaining hours.

The human form was not a poem to be appreciated, he learned, but a treasure chest of secrets to be laid open, an instrument to be played. She liked to hear his voice in her ears and he had no words of his own for the occasion, so he borrowed those of another: "_Vivamus atque amemus…_" as he learned anew what made her groan longingly and what made her scream softly against his shoulder, "_…da mi basia mille, deinde centum,_" as he marveled at the wonders of stoking the desire for oneself in another, of becoming that which another being needed to be complete. "_Cum milia multa fecerimus…,_" as he joined their bodies again, feeling the delicious bite of her nails digging into his biceps, "_ne quis malus inuidere posit_," he chanted as he urged her body to tighten around him once more, the words becoming more staccato as he found his own release, "_cum tantum sciat esse basiorum_," he finished as he carefully wrung the last drop of pleasure from her body.

"That was…wondrous," he said when they had both recovered somewhat. "Thank you."

She touched his hair with a tenderness he let himself believe was affection rather than endorphins. "You looked like a kid in a candy store," she told him. "You should smile more."

He smiled again to please her as he returned their clothing to its proper place. She bolted upright, as if the reminder inherent in the action had ended the moment of pleasure that they had stolen for themselves. "Jo," she said. "What time is it?"

"She is sleeping, and it's the same moment that we left the island," he reassured her. "I moved us outside time, so we wouldn't be disturbed."

She stopped in the act of smoothing down her hair. "Most people would have locked the door."

"I'm not most people," he reminded her. "And I would not rob you of any more time with your daughter."

"Last night on earth." She straightened her shoulders and adjusted the collar of her shirt as if putting on armor. _Virago_, his last host would have called her admiringly, a woman with a man's spirit, and Castiel agreed with the sentiment if not the expression. Still, no amount of courage could change the fact that their few short years of hunting had left her and her daughter ill-prepared to face the devil. "Well, I had a good run."

_'We must have faith,'_ he once would have told her. Instead, he said, "Anything can happen in battle."

"Yeah," she said without conviction, slipping to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. "Speaking of battles—Sam and Dean are good boys, but their bickering in the car will drive you crazy."

Castiel was pleased to discover he could quickly read the meaning behind her words; it was only a shame that he had learned intuition so late in the game. "I'd better ride with you and Jo, then."

Her smile lit up the room, and the world would be a worse place without it. "Good night, Cas."

"Good night," he echoed as she left. Then he slid between the molecules of air and outside the house to keep watch, carefully flipping his collar over a little bite mark he'd let remain on his neck.

~ ~  
Further A/N: I've made Castiel's first-century vessel a native Greek-speaker because that language was more widely spoken than Latin in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Judea. The location is Tiberius's Villa Jovis on Capri, which truly is a stunningly beautiful place. Finally, a couple fragments of the poetry of Sappho are worked into the first sex scene, and Catullus's Carmen 5 is in the second. Castiel's quoting those authors because they wrote the love poetry most widely read the last time he was on earth.


End file.
